MCLC: price of marriage

[Denton, Kirk]

MCLC LIST
From: Anne Henochowicz <anne at chinadigitaltimes.net>
Subject: price of marriage
***********************************************************

Source: NYT (3/9/13):
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/10/business/in-a-changing-china-new-matchmak
ing-markets.html

The Price of Marriage in China
By BROOK LARMER

FROM her stakeout near the entrance of an H & M store in Joy City, a
Beijing shopping mall, Yang Jing seemed lost in thought, twirling a strand
of her auburn-tinted hair, tapping her nails on an aquamarine iPhone 4S.
But her eyes kept moving. They tracked the clusters of young women
zigzagging from Zara to Calvin Klein Jeans. They lingered on a face, a
gesture, and then moved on, darting across the atrium, searching.

“This is a good place to hunt,” she told me. “I always have good luck
here.”

For Ms. Yang, Joy City is not so much a consumer mecca as an urban
Serengeti that she prowls for potential wives for some of China’s richest
bachelors. Ms. Yang, 28, is one of China’s premier love hunters, a new
breed of matchmaker that has proliferated in the country’s economic boom.
The company she works for, Diamond Love and Marriage, caters to China’s
nouveaux riches: men, and occasionally women, willing to pay tens and even
hundreds of thousands of dollars to outsource the search for their ideal
spouse.

In Joy City, Ms. Yang gave instructions to her eight-scout team, one of
six squads the company was deploying in three cities for one Shanghai
millionaire. This client had provided a list of requirements for his
future wife, including her age (22 to 26), skin color (“white as
porcelain”) and sexual history (yes, a virgin).

“These millionaires are very picky, you know?” Ms. Yang said. “Nobody can
ever be perfect enough.” Still, the potential reward for Ms. Yang is huge:
The love hunter who finds the client’s eventual choice will receive a
bonus of more than $30,000, around five times the average annual salary in
this line of work.

Suddenly, a signal came.

From across the atrium, a co-worker of Ms. Yang caught her eye and nodded
at a woman in a blue dress, walking alone. Ms. Yang had shaken off her
colleague’s suggestions several times that day, but this time she circled
behind the woman in question.

“Perfect skin,” she whispered. “Elegant face.” When the woman walked into
H & M, Ms. Yang intercepted her in the sweater aisle. “I’m so sorry to
bother you,” she said with a honeyed smile. “I’m a love hunter. Are you
looking for love?”

Three miles away, in a Beijing park near the Temple of Heaven, a woman
named Yu Jia jostled for space under a grove of elms. A widowed
67-year-old pensioner, she was clearing a spot on the ground for a sign
she had scrawled for her son. “Seeking Marriage,” read the wrinkled sheet
of paper, which Ms. Yu held in place with a few fragments of brick and
stone. “Male. Single. Born 1972. Height 172 cm. High school education. Job
in Beijing.”

Ms. Yu is another kind of love hunter: a parent seeking a spouse for an
adult child in the so-called marriage markets that have popped up in parks
across the city. Long rows of graying men and women sat in front of signs
listing their children’s qualifications. Hundreds of others trudged by,
stopping occasionally to make an inquiry.

Ms. Yu’s crude sign had no flourishes: no photograph, no blood type, no
zodiac sign, no line about income or assets. Unlike the millionaire’s wish
list, the sign didn’t even specify what sort of wife her son wanted. “We
don’t have much choice,” she explained. “At this point, we can’t rule
anybody out.”

In the four years she has been seeking a wife for her son, Zhao Yong,
there have been only a handful of prospects. Even so, when a woman in a
green plastic visor paused to scan her sign that day, Ms. Yu put on a
bright smile and told of her son’s fine character and good looks. The
woman asked: “Does he own an apartment in Beijing?” Ms. Yu’s smile wilted,
and the woman moved on.

The New Matchmaking

Three decades of combustive economic growth have reshaped the landscape of
marriage in China. A generation ago, China was one of the world’s most
equal nations, in both gender and wealth. Most people were poor, and tight
controls over housing, employment, travel and family life simplified the
search for a suitable match — what the Chinese call mendang hudui, meaning
roughly “family doors of equal size.”

Like many Chinese who came of age in the 1960s and ’70s, Ms. Yu married a
man from her factory work unit, with their local Communist Party boss as
informal matchmaker. As recently as 1990, researchers found that a vast
majority of residents in two of China’s largest cities dated just one
person before marriage: their prospective spouse.

China’s transition to a market economy has swept away many restrictions in
people’s lives. But of all the new freedoms the Chinese enjoy today —
making money, owning a house, choosing a career — there is one that has
become an unexpected burden: seeking a spouse. This may be a time of
sexual and romantic liberation in China, but the solemn task of finding a
husband or wife is proving to be a vexing proposition for rich and poor
Alike.

“The old family and social networks that people used to rely on for
finding a husband or wife have fallen apart,” said James Farrer, an
American sociologist whose book, “Opening Up,”
<http://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/O/bo3619770.html> looks
at sex, dating and marriage in contemporary China. “There’s a huge sense
of dislocation in China, and young people don’t know where to turn.”

The confusion surrounding marriage in China reflects a country in frenzied
transition. Sharp inequalities of wealth have created new fault lines in
society, while the largest rural-to-urban migration in history has blurred
many of the old ones. As many as 300 million rural Chinese have moved to
cities in the last three decades. Uprooted and without nearby relatives to
help arrange meetings with potential partners, these migrants are often
lost in the swell of the big city.

Demographic changes, too, are creating complications. Not only are many
more Chinese women postponing marriage to pursue careers, but China’s
gender gap — 118 boys are born for every 100 girls — has become one of the
world’s widest, fueled in large part by the government’s restrictive
one-child policy. By the end of this decade, Chinese researchers estimate,
the country will have a surplus of 24 million unmarried men.

Without traditional family or social networks, many men and women have
taken their searches online, where thousands of dating and marriage Web
sites have sprung up in an industry that analysts predict will soon
surpass $300 million annually. These sites cater mainly to China’s
millions of white-collar workers. But intense competition, along with
mistrust of potential mates’ online claims, has spurred a growing number
of singles — rich and poor — to turn to more hands-on matchmaking services.

China’s matchmaking tradition stretches back more than 2,000 years, to the
first imperial marriage broker in the late Zhou dynasty. The goal of
matchmakers ever since has usually been to pair families of equal stature
for the greater social good. Today, however, matchmaking has warped into a
commercial free-for-all in which marriage is often viewed as an
opportunity to leap up the social ladder or to proclaim one’s arrival at
the top.

Single men have a hard time making the list if they don’t own a house or
an apartment, which in cities like Beijing are extremely expensive. And
despite the gender imbalance, Chinese women face intense pressure to be
married before the age of 28, lest they be rejected and stigmatized as
“leftover women.”

Dozens of high-end matchmaking services have sprung up in China in the
last five years, charging big fees to find and to vet prospective spouses
for wealthy clients. Their methods can turn into gaudy spectacle. One firm
transported 200 would-be trophy wives to a resort town in southwestern
China for the perusal of one powerful magnate. Another organized a caravan
of BMWs for rich businessmen to find young wives in Sichuan Province.
Diamond Love, among the largest love-hunting services, sponsored a
matchmaking event in 2009 where 21 men each paid a $15,000 entrance fee.

Over the last year, I tracked the progress of two matchmaking efforts at
the opposite extremes of wealth. Together, they help illuminate the forces
reshaping marriage in China.

In one case, Ms. Yu’s migrant son reluctantly agreed to allow his aging
mother to make the search for his future wife her all-consuming mission.
In the other, Ms. Yang’s richest client at Diamond Love deployed dozens of
love hunters to find the most exquisite fair-skinned beauty in the land,
even as he fretted about being conned by a bai jin nu, or gold digger.

Between the two extremes is Ms. Yang herself, whose very success as a love
hunter has made her the breadwinner in her own family. Despite her growing
discomfort with the sexism that permeates the love-hunting business, she
has sympathy for her superrich clients.

“These men are lost souls,” she said. “They worked hard, made a lot of
money, and left their old world behind. Now they don’t have time to find a
wife, and they don’t know whom to trust. So they come to us.”

A Very Particular Client

When I first visited the Beijing office of Diamond Love last year, Ms.
Yang was fretting over a love-hunting campaign for a potential client: a
divorced 42-year-old property mogul who was prepared to spend the
equivalent of more than a half-million dollars.

This wouldn’t be the biggest case in company history; two years ago, a man
paid $1.5 million for a successful 12-city hunt. But the pressure felt
more intense this time. It wasn’t just that Ms. Yang would vie with
hundreds of other love hunters for a possible winner’s bonus of $32,000.
Her boss had entrusted her with a central role in this campaign — the
firm’s biggest of the year — with a client who was known to be an
imperious perfectionist. Failure was a real possibility.

Ms. Yang started part-time work as a love hunter while a university
student eight years ago. After a brief stint as a hospital nurse, she
joined Diamond Love full time and is now its most seasoned Beijing scout.
Despite a recent promotion to a consulting job, in which she deals
directly with clients and their delicate egos, she is often tapped to lead
the highest-stakes campaigns.

Her hit rate is astonishing. In three large-scale campaigns over the last
three years, the firm’s top clients ended up choosing candidates whom Ms.
Yang personally discovered. Her success has earned her huge bonuses — in
one case, $27,000 — and a reputation as one of China’s most accomplished
love hunters.

Still, she told me that this new case was “nearly impossible.”

Mr. Big, as I’ll call him — he insisted that Diamond Love not reveal his
name — is a member of China’s fuyidai, the “first-generation rich” who
have leapt from poverty to extreme wealth in a single bound, often
jettisoning their first wives in the process. Diamond Love’s clientele
also includes many fuerdai, or “second-generation-rich,” men and women in
their 20s and 30s whose search is often bankrolled by wealthy parents keen
on exerting control over their marital choices as well as the family
inheritance.

But fuyidai like Mr. Big are accustomed to being the boss and can be the
most uncompromising clients.

Mr. Big had an excruciatingly specific requirement for his second wife.
The ideal woman, he said, would look like a younger replica of Zhou Tao, a
famous Chinese television host: slim with pure white skin, slightly
pointed chin, perfect teeth, double eyelids and long silken hair. To
ensure her good character and fortune, he insisted that her wuguan — a
feng shui-like reading of the sense organs on the face — show perfect
harmony.

“When clients start out, all they want is beauty — how tall, how white,
how thin,” Ms. Yang said. “Sometimes the person they’re looking for
doesn’t exist in nature. Even if we find her, these clients often have no
idea whether that would make their hearts feel settled. It’s our job to
try to move them from fantasy toward reality.”

Fantasy, of course, is precisely what Diamond Love sells. Ms. Yang’s boss,
Fei Yang, is a smoky-voiced woman in a black leather jacket who used to
trade in electronic goods. Inviting me to sit on a bright pink couch in
her lushly carpeted office, she explained how the firm has “spread the
culture of the relationship” since 2005, when it opened in Shanghai. It
now has six branches, with 200 consultants, 200 full-time love hunters and
hundreds more part-time scouts, virtually all of them women.

Teacher Fei, as her employees call her, runs a series of “how to be a
better wife” workshops that coach women on the finer points of managing a
wealthy household, reading their husbands’ moods and “understanding the
importance of sexual relations.” The fee for two, 14-day courses is
$16,000.

But Diamond Love’s chief target is men, the wealthier the better. The
company’s four million members are mostly men who pay from a few dollars a
month for basic searches to more than $15,000 for access to exclusive
databases with customized assistance from a professional love consultant.

The company’s wealthiest, highest-paying clients — 90 percent of whom are
men — show little interest in lectures or databases. They want exclusive
access to what Ms. Fei coolly refers to as “fresh resources”: young women
who haven’t yet been exposed to other suitors online. It’s the love
hunters’ job to find them.

Besides giving clients a vastly expanded pool of marriage prospects, these
campaigns offer a sense of security. Rigorous background checks screen out
what Ms. Fei calls “gold diggers, liars and people of loose morals.”
Depending on a campaign’s size, Diamond Love charges from $50,000 to more
than $1 million. Ms. Fei makes no apologies for the high fees.

“Why shouldn’t they pay more to find the perfect wife?” she asked me.
“This is the most important investment in their lives.”

Even before Mr. Big signed a contract, Ms. Yang sensed trouble brewing.
She and a colleague culled the company’s exclusive databases to find women
to serve as templates for the love hunters’ search. Together with Mr. Big,
they looked at the files and pictures of their top 3,000 women. He
rejected them all.

“Even if the girl’s eyebrow was just a half-millimeter too high, he would
toss the photo out and say, ‘No good!’ ” Ms. Yang said. “He always found
something to complain about.”

With more than a half-million dollars on the line, Ms. Yang was beginning
to doubt her ability to deliver. And not just for Mr. Big. One afternoon
when we met, the normally animated Ms. Yang slumped onto the sofa,
exhausted. She had just spent an hour with a rich Chinese businesswoman in
her late 30s. The woman proposed spending $100,000 on a campaign to find a
husband who matched her status.

“I had to tell her we couldn’t take her case,” Ms. Yang said. “No wealthy
Chinese man would ever marry her. They always want somebody younger, with
less power.”

We sat in silence a minute before Ms. Yang spoke again. “It’s depressing
to think about these ‘leftover women,’ ” she said. “Do you have them in
America, too?”

A Mother’s Search

Yu Jia kept her search a secret at first. She didn’t want to risk
upsetting her son so soon after a trying time for the family. Ms. Yu and
her husband, who was sick with lung cancer, had left the northern city of
Harbin in the hope of finding better treatment for his cancer in Beijing,
where two of their sons already lived. The husband hung on for a year
before he died in 2009 — not long, but long enough to wipe out the last of
the family’s $25,000 in savings.

Devastated, Ms. Yu stayed in an apartment on the outskirts of Beijing with
her sons — one married; the other, Zhao Yong, still single at 36. But one
day, Ms. Yu came upon a crowd swarming under the elm trees near the Temple
of Heaven.

Her life suddenly had a new purpose. “I decided that I will not go home
until I find a wife for my son,” she told me. “It’s the only thing left
unfinished in my life.”

Plunging into a crowd of strangers with her sign made Ms. Yu feel awkward
at first. Her elder two sons had found wives in traditional ways, one
through a matchmaker, the other through a friend. But Mr. Zhao, her
youngest, had not. After losing his job in an electronics factory in
Harbin, he followed his hometown sweetheart to Beijing. They were in love
and planned to marry. But her family demanded a bride price — a sort of
dowry used in rural China — of $15,000. His family could not afford it,
and the relationship ended.

Mr. Zhao threw himself into his work as a driver and salesman. His former
girlfriend married and had a baby. He told his mother he had little time
to think about marriage.

The strangers in the park, uprooted from their traditional family and
hometown networks, shared similar stories, and Ms. Yu found comfort there.
Many other parents, she realized, were even more frantic; they had only
one child because of China’s policy. (Ms. Yu, as a rural mother, was
permitted to have multiple offspring.)

The marriage candidates on offer in the parks, she discovered, were often
a mismatch of shengnu (“leftover women”) and shengnan (“leftover men”),
two groups from opposite ends of the social scale. Shengnan, like her son,
are mostly poor rural men left behind as female counterparts marry up in
age and social status. The phenomenon is exacerbated by China’s warped
demographics, as the bubble of excess men starts to reach marrying age.

Finding a Chinese spouse can be even more challenging for so-called
leftover women, even if they often have precisely what the shengnan lack:
money, education and social and professional standing. One day in the
Temple of Heaven park, I met a 70-year-old pensioner from Anhui Province
who was seeking a husband for his eldest daughter, a 36-year-old economics
professor in Beijing.

“My daughter is an outstanding girl,” he said, pulling from his satchel an
academic book she had published. “She’s been introduced to about 15 men
over the past two years, but they all rejected her because her degree is
too high.”

The failure compelled him to forbid his youngest daughter from going to
graduate school. “No man will want you,” he told her. That daughter is now
married in Anhui, with an infant son whom the pensioner, so busy seeking a
spouse for her older sister in Beijing, rarely sees.

Ms. Yu’s son, Mr. Zhao, was angry when he found out that she had been
searching for a wife for him. He didn’t want to rely on anybody else’s
marketing, especially his mother’s. But he has since relented.

“I see how hard she works, so I can’t refuse,” he told me.

Ms. Yu doesn’t tell her son about the parents who scoff when they find out
he has no property and no Beijing residency permit. But the handful of
young women she’s persuaded to meet him never made it to a second date.

One afternoon last summer, however, there was a glimmer of hope. Ms. Yu
traded information with a mother who didn’t dismiss her son out of hand.
The woman’s daughter was 35, with a good education, a substantial income
and a Beijing residency permit. She was, in some eyes, a leftover woman.
Ms. Yu e-mailed Mr. Zhao’s picture to her that evening. The daughter
declined to meet at first. A week later, she called back: “Yes, maybe.”

Ms. Yu was thrilled. It was her first solid lead in months.

High Fees and Secrecy

The second time I dropped by Diamond Love’s offices last year, Yang Jing
took me by the arm and whispered: “We’ve had a spy!”

A few days earlier, just as Mr. Big was set to sign the contract and begin
paying his $600,000 fee, a woman from a competing agency contacted him.
Displaying inside knowledge of his contract with Diamond Love, she offered
to carry out an even more comprehensive search. Mr. Big called Diamond
Love in a rage that his confidential information had been leaked.

Within hours, according to Ms. Yang, the office’s management team ferreted
out and dismissed the office mole — a secretary whom the competitor had
recruited as a spy. But it took a full week of apologies and vows of
enhanced security to coax Mr. Big to finally sign the contract. The terms
stipulated that his file would be destroyed, “Mission Impossible”-style,
once he had found a wife.

“We always sign confidentiality agreements,” Ms. Yang said, “but now we’re
operating like a secret organization.”
The day Mr. Big signed, Ms. Yang took a flight to Chengdu, capital of
Sichuan Province, where she would kick-start the campaign. During her
20-day search there, she had recurring nightmares. “I always feel
unsettled during a campaign,” she said, “but this time, the stress was
crazy.”

Her team of 10 love hunters scoured university campuses and shopping malls
for three weeks, trying to meet a daily quota of 20 high-quality women, or
two per person. Ms. Yang offered a bonus, about $16, for every candidate
above the quota and set a personal goal of finding 10 “Class A” women a
day herself.

Ms. Yang wasn’t just haunted by a fear of letting the ideal candidate —
and the bonus — slip out of her grasp. The office leak had also made her
worry about security. One more false step and Mr. Big would bolt.

One afternoon in Chengdu, after slurping down a bowl of beef noodles at
Master Kong’s Chef’s Table, Ms. Yang noticed a young woman sweeping past
her into the restaurant, chatting on a cellphone. Long black hair hid most
of the woman’s face, but there was something captivating about her laugh
and easy gait.

“She seemed open, warm, happy,” Ms. Yang said. After a moment of
indecision, Ms. Yang followed her inside, apologized for the intrusion and
switched on her charm. Linking arms with the woman — one of her patented
moves — Ms. Yang came away with her phone number, photograph and a few
pertinent details: she was 24, a graduate student and a near-ringer for
the TV hostess Zhou Tao.

A Proposal Rejected

One Friday last fall, I met with Yu Jia and her son Zhao Yong at a
McDonald’s in western Beijing. Now 39, Mr. Zhao has a youthful, unlined
face. Still, he worries that time is passing him by. To save money and to
enhance his marriage prospects, he works two jobs simultaneously — one
selling microwaves, the other cosmetics — crisscrossing the city on his
electric bike. He earns about $1,000 a month, and sometimes adds $80 more
by working weekends as a film extra.

It is a respectable income, but hardly enough to attract a bride in
Beijing. Even in the countryside, where men’s families pay bride prices,
inflation is rampant. Ms. Yu’s family paid about $3,500 when Mr. Zhao’s
older brother married 10 years ago in rural Heilongjiang. Today, she said,
brides’ families ask for $30,000, even $50,000. An apartment, the urban
equivalent of the bride price, is even further out of reach. At Mr. Zhao’s
current income, it would take a decade or two before he could afford a
small Beijing apartment, which he said would start at about $100,000.
“I’ll be an old man by then,” he said with a rueful smile.

Mr. Zhao has met several women on online dating sites, but he lost faith
in the Internet when several women lied to him about their marital status
and family backgrounds. His mother, however, had come through, arranging a
meeting between him and the daughter of the woman she had met in the
marriage market.

Not long after our conversation in McDonald’s, Mr. Zhao met the woman at a
coffee shop. It was, he told me later, even more awkward than most first
dates. A rural migrant and door-to-door salesman, he struggled to find a
shared topic of interest with the woman, a 35-year-old entrepreneur and
Beijing native who had arrived driving a BMW sedan.

The lack of chemistry didn’t seem to bother the woman, who told him about
her profitable photo business and the three Beijing apartments she owned.
Mr. Zhao didn’t find her unattractive, but how was he supposed to respond?
Then, even before broaching the possibility of a second date, he said, the
woman made a proposition: if they married, he wouldn’t have to work again.

“She said she made enough money for the two of us,” he said. “I could have
anything I want.”

The marriage proposal stunned him. He had never heard a woman talk in such
blunt, pragmatic terms. A life of wealth and leisure sounded tempting.
Still, in the end, he couldn’t imagine being subordinate to a woman. “If I
accepted that situation,” he asked me, “what kind of man would I be?”

It took Mr. Zhao several days before he worked up the nerve to tell his
mother he had rejected the offer. He knew how hard she had worked, how
much she had been counting on this. The news frustrated Ms. Yu. “Kids
these days are way too picky,” she said.

Even with this setback, Ms. Yu has continued her daily pilgrimage to the
marriage markets. When I last spoke to her early this month, she was
arranging dates for her son with three new marriage candidates she had
found. “I’m optimistic,” she said. After all these years, hope is what
keeps her going.

Culling the Prospects

The love-hunting campaign for Mr. Big yielded more than 1,100 fresh
prospects who met his general specifications, including 200 in Chengdu.
“The cruel process of culling,” as Ms. Yang called it, whittled that
number to 100, then 20, and finally to a list of eight. (For Diamond Love,
a fringe benefit of love-hunting campaigns is that the hundreds of
rejected potential mates can be cycled into its databases — a process of
replenishment paid for by its richest clients.)

The firm subjected the finalists to another round of interviews and
psychological evaluations. Barely two months after the search began, Mr.
Big received thick dossiers on each of the eight, with detailed
information about their families and finances, habits and hobbies, and
physical and mental conditions.

Finally, a series of grainy videos landed in his e-mail in-box. The first
showed the top three prospects from Chengdu, sitting and standing, walking
and talking, smiling and laughing. One of them, a demure 24-year-old with
long black hair and black hot pants who seemed poised in front of the
camera, was the graduate student whom Ms. Yang had pursued on a hunch at
Master Kong Chef’s Table.

Ms. Yang’s hunting skills and tenacity had paid off again, giving her two
of the eight finalists, and a 25 percent chance of winning the bonus of
$32,000. (For finding two of the top 20, she had already earned a share of
a smaller bonus.) When I asked about the reward, Ms. Yang demurred at
first. “My aim is just to find a match that makes both people happy,” she
said, before adding: “Inside my heart, I want my girls to win.”

Ms. Yang has worked hard for the chance. She heads to her job early in the
morning and returns after 8 p.m., leaving her 5-year-old son in her
mother-in-law’s care. She is often gone for weeks at a time on
love-hunting trips. Her husband, whom she married at 22, when he was 35,
ran a trucking logistics company that folded in 2009. Since then, he
hasn’t worked much. With one large bonus, Ms. Yang bought him a Mitsubishi
car that he tinkers with. Her occupation has given her a rather jaded view
of the prospects for career women like herself. Once she told me
half-jokingly: “It’s a good thing I’m already married. I would never stand
a chance.”

Mr. Big’s Choice

In June, Mr. Big flew to Chengdu for meetings with the three local
finalists. Riding an elevator to the lobby of the Shangri-La Hotel, he
fidgeted nervously with the part in his moussed hair. He had invested more
than a half-million dollars in the search, and was about to see if the
money was well spent.

His final date in Chengdu was with the Zhou Tao look-alike whom Ms. Yang
had approached at the noodle restaurant. At first, it seemed a mismatch,
and not just because of the 18-year age gap. He knew nearly everything
about her — her dating history, her recent acceptance to a graduate
school, her father’s lofty government post — while she knew little more
than his height and weight. She didn’t even know his name. Diamond Love
had told her only that his net worth exceeded $800,000.

The young woman tried to keep things casual by taking him to a local
Sichuanese restaurant. But Mr. Big insisted on bringing along a female
consultant from Diamond Love and sitting awkwardly off to one side during
the meal. According to the consultant, Li Minmin, he sat in this position
“to better evaluate her profile, her skin, and her teeth.”

The two barely spoke without the consultant’s prodding. Still, Mr. Big
seemed pleased by the woman’s sense of privacy when he inquired about her
father’s job. “He’s a civil servant,” she said. What level? “Management.”
It took several minutes — and a blunt question about his title — before
she acknowledged that her father was, in fact, the boss of an influential
government office. “From childhood,” she told him, “my father taught me to
keep a low profile.”

Suddenly, this seemed like a suitable match in the Chinese tradition of
family doors of equal size. Here were two discreet people of similar
social status, a wealthy entrepreneur and the daughter of a high-ranking
official.

After dinner, Mr. Big called off all other dates with finalists and
dispatched his consultant to buy a Gucci handbag for the woman, as a token
of affection. Barely a week later, in early July, he flew her to Hainan
Island for a vacation at a luxury beachside resort. The two stayed in
separate hotel rooms. When they returned, Ms. Li assured me that “the
relationship is still pure.”

Ms. Yang was pleased that her love-hunting had hit the mark, but she
wished that the courtship would move faster: a $32,000 bonus could make a
big difference to her family. After texting and phoning, the couple met
again in Beijing and then took a holiday in a mountainous area of western
Sichuan Province. In Chengdu, though, he declined to meet the woman’s
parents, and instead of joining her at a wedding of her friends, stayed in
the hotel.

The couple has not yet decided to marry. But they are still dating
exclusively, and Ms. Yang says Mr. Big is serious about marriage. Nobody
pays a half-million dollars “just to play around,” she says. “He just
needs a little more time.”

© 2013 The New York Times Company.